Hey guys. I have a character that has paint effects hair but a scene that is set up for mental ray. I am trying to convert the hair to polygons so I can use GI and FG and raytraced shadows. What i need is a decent way to get the poly hair to cast shadows but be transparent. I tried to use the method found on a tutorial on the 3D total site called Bean Pod blooming that uses a MIB_shadow_transparency, node but I cannot get this to work. Anyone have any ideas?

TheOnlyAaron

188 posts

02 Jun 2009

I believe there is a "primary visibility" value you can turn off for objects in Maya. This essentially makes the object not visible to the camera, but does all of the other operations, like shadow, reflections, etc...

I am not certain that this is what you are looking for, but it may be a place to start.

rosetaylor01

3 posts

13 Oct 2009

hi there.......

Maya Hair is used to create hair style from which hair curves is extracted. These curves will be used to create Shave hair for rendering purposes. The reason is that Maya Hair is very good in dynamics while Shave is very bad in it when the hair is long. Another reason is that the result of rendering Maya Hair in mental ray is very bad. Even if it is rendered in Maya renderer, there is still an anti-aliasing problem......

neilkevins

3 posts

07 Nov 2009

hi there...

If you want to speed up your rendering with paint fx converted polygons, you can select all the hair polygons and Poly Combine them after you've finished your shading of them. mental ray renders small numbers of large amount/dense polygons faster than it does large numbers of small polygons.